Last Bender

Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, Circa 800-1830 is out. Volume 1 is one of the most extraordinary books of historical scholarship I have ever read. It builds upon and expands vastly theoretical and conceptual approaches pioneered by Anthony Reid. It’s been too long since I have read volume [...]

 
Hubert Humphrey
A Biography
By Carl Solberg
1984, Norton & Norton, New York
Borealis Books edition, 2003
 The Vietnam Project began with a simple desire to know what happened during the Vietnam War. By the time I got around to writing this blogh, to formalizing it as a ‘project’, my interest had run riot to include the entire history of [...]

SOCIETY, ECONOMICS, AND POLITICS IN PRE-ANGKOR CAMBODIA
THE 7TH-8TH CENTURIES
BY MICHAEL VICKERY
The Centre For east Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco,
the Toyo Bunko, 1998
Michael Vickery is foremost an historian of ancient Cambodia. But he has also written about modern Cambodia. He is a Marxist, and his writing has a strong polemical current running throughout it. Even when [...]

The Birth of Vietnam
By Keith Taylor
Berkeley : University of California Press, c1982.
xxi, 397 p. : maps ; 24 cm.
http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Vietnam-Keith-Weller-Taylor/dp/0520074173
The Civilization of Angkor
By Charles Higham
London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.
xv, 192 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Angkor-Charles-Higham/dp/0520242181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262619216&sr=1-1
In my last South East Asia post I subjected the reader to a lengthy complaint with illustrations from illustrious texts. [...]

South East Asian Historiography
Not long ago I finished William Southworth’s two volume dissertation on Champa. Since there is very little written in English about Champa I was excited to find it, and I was not disappointed, really, or at least, I had no right to be. I have also just finished reading Georges Maspero’s [...]

My interest in Champa was aroused by reading about the American War with Vietnam. As I read more and more history I came to think that Vietnam is most often viewed as being the object of other nations’ foreign policy. In this formulation Vietnam is the great, anti-colonial champion of the world. Histories stated that [...]

 Early Indonesian Commerce and the Nanhai Trade
Wang, Gungwu.
The Nanhai trade : early Chinese trade in the South China Sea
Singapore : Eastern Universities Press, 2003.
xviii, 165 p. : maps ; 23 cm.
(JOURNAL OF THE MALAYAN BRANCH OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. (COVERING THE TERRITORIES OF THE FEDERATION OF MALAYA, THE STATE OF SINGAPORE, THE COLONIES SARAWAK [...]

THE STONES OF AUSTRONESIA
 
Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula
By Paul Michel Munoz
Editions Didier Millet
Singapore
2006
 
Southeast Asia
from prehistory to history
Edited by Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood
RoutledgeCurzon
New York and Oxford
2004
 
I have been reading in Bellwood and Glover’s book Southeast Asia: From Pre-History to History and in Paul Munoz’s Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago [...]

The Golden Khersonese
STUDIES IN THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA BEFORE A.D. 1500
By Paul Wheatley
Kuala Lumpur
University of Malaya Press
1961
An historical geography, in the hands of the right author, is an instance of what I would call the poetry of fact. Most poets are attracted to nonfiction. Blaise Cendrars, the great French writer, traveler, rogue, raconteur, [...]

The Rice Economies
 
By Francesca Bray
 
Basil Blackwell Ltd 1986
 
http://www.amazon.com/Rice-Economies-Francesca-Bray/dp/B001Q1YHAG/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233256698&sr=1-6
 
 
Just as any study of Vietnam in some way begins with Chinese written sources, any understanding of Vietnam must begin with rice. And the book on rice I started with is Francesca Bray’s The Rice Economies. Bray is not a great stylist or anything, but she is concise [...]